Dyslexia is a learning disorder that manifests itself primarily as a difficulty with reading and spelling. It is separate and distinct from reading difficulties resulting from other causes, such as a non-neurological deficiency with vision or hearing, or from poor or inadequate reading instruction. It is estimated that dyslexia affects between 5% to 17% of the U.S. population.
Although dyslexia is thought to be the result of a neurological difference, it is not an intellectual disability. Dyslexia is diagnosed in people of all levels of intelligence: below average, average, above average, and highly gifted.
Dyslexia symptoms vary according to the severity of the disorder as well as the age of the individual.
Pre-school age children. It is difficult to obtain a certain diagnosis of dyslexia before a child begins school, but many dyslexic individuals have a history of difficulties that began well before kindergarten. Children who exhibit these symptoms have a higher risk of being diagnosed as dyslexic than other children. Some of these symptoms are:                Learns new words slowly;        Has difficulty rhyming words, as in nursery rhymes;        Late in establishing a dominant hand.        Early elementary school-age children:        Difficulty learning the alphabet;        Difficulty with associating sounds with the letters that represent them (sound-symbol correspondence);        Difficulty identifying or generating rhyming words, or counting syllables in words (phonological awareness);        Difficulty segmenting words into individual sounds, or blending sounds to make words (phonemic awareness);        Difficulty with word retrieval or naming problems;        Difficulty learning to decode words;        Confusion with before/after, right/left, over/under, and so on;        Difficulty distinguishing between similar sounds in words; mixing up sounds in multisyllable words (auditory discrimination) (for example, “aminal” for animal, “bisghetti” for spaghetti).        Older elementary school children:        Slow or inaccurate reading.        Very poor spelling;        Difficulty associating individual words with their correct meanings;        Difficulty with time keeping and concept of time;        Difficulty with organization skills;        Due to fear of speaking incorrectly, some children become withdrawn and shy or become bullies out of their inability to understand the social cues in their environment;        Difficulty comprehending rapid instructions, following more than one command at a time or remembering the sequence of things;        Reversals of letters (b for d) and a reversal of words (saw for was) are typical among children who have dyslexia. Reversals are also common for children age 6 and younger who don't have dyslexia. But with dyslexia, the reversals persist;        Children with dyslexia may fail to see (and occasionally to hear) similarities and differences in letters and words, may not recognize the spacing that organizes letters into separate words, and may be unable to sound out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word.        
The complexity of a language's orthography, or writing and spelling system, has a direct impact on how difficult it is to learn to read in that language; formally, this is the orthographic depth. Although English has an alphabetic orthography, it is a complex or deep orthography that employs spelling patterns at several levels. The major structural categories that make up English spelling are letter-sound correspondences, syllables, and morphemes. Some other languages, such as Spanish, have alphabetic orthographies that employ only letter-sound correspondences, so-called shallow orthographies. It is relatively easy to learn to read in languages like Spanish; it is much more difficult to learn to read in languages that have more complex orthographies, as in English. Logographic writing systems, notably Chinese characters, pose additional difficulties.
From a neurological perspective, different types of writing, for example, alphabetic as compared to pictographic, require different neurological pathways in order to read, write and spell. Because different writing systems require different parts of the brain to process the visual notation of speech, children with reading problems in one language might not have a reading problem in a language with a different orthography. The neurological skills required to perform the tasks of reading, writing, and spelling can vary between different writing systems and as a result different neurological skill deficits can cause dyslexic problems in relation to different orthographies.
There is no cure for dyslexia, but dyslexic individuals can learn to read and write with appropriate educational support. For alphabet writing systems, the fundamental aim is to increase a child's awareness of correspondences between graphemes and phonemes, and to relate these to reading and spelling. It has been found that training focused towards visual language and orthographic issues yields longer-lasting gains than mere oral phonological training. The best approach is determined by the underlying neurological cause(s) of the dyslexic symptom.
People with dyslexia are often gifted in math. Their three-dimensional visualization skills help them “see” math concepts more quickly and clearly than non-dyslexic people. Unfortunately, difficulties in directionality, rote memorization, reading, and sequencing can make the math tasks so difficult that their math gifts are never discovered. In particular, many dyslexic children and teens have problems in some areas of math, especially the multiplication tables, fractions, decimals, percentages, ratio and statistics. Thus, good methods for teaching math to dyslexic individuals emphasize their visualization skills.
The present invention provides methods and apparatus for teaching reading and math skills to individuals with dyslexia and dyscalculia. The same methods and apparatus may also provide similar aid to individuals with similar cognitive disorders, such as aphasia. The tools of the present invention can be used in combination with other programs and systems. Primary users are dyslexics, but other customers could include students studying English as a second language and the Conceptual Clarifier's could be used by those suffering from aphasia and averbia. Conversely, the tools could also be used to help dyslexics learn other languages. The syllable form of PHONETOSE™ can be used by a student to help learn syllable languages such as Korean and Japanese. The tone system could also help a dyslexic student learn Mandarin or Cantonese Chinese.